Abdo Wazen
Summary: For the first time, a selection of al-Mutanabbi’s poetry has been translated into Turkish. The translation is the work of the Arabist Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, a scholar and academic known for his passion for classical and modern Arabic poetry, and above all for the poet who “kept people busy and filled the world.” Titled İnsanın Şarkısı [The Song of Man], the selection brings together lines and passages from the emotional, introspective poetry for which the poet of “the horses, the night and the desert” is known, away from his poems of praise, satire and elegy.
There is no doubt that the Turkish Arabist Mehmet Hakkı Suçin is one of the orientalists, or Arabists, with the firmest command of Arabic: he not only reads and writes it well, but has also studied its grammar and morphology in depth. While most orientalists read Arabic and know it well as a language of oriental studies, they have rarely written in Arabic itself; Suçin, by contrast, writes Arabic like its native speakers who master it, and has many studies and articles in the language of the ḍād. Perhaps this qualifies him more than anyone else to take on the masterpieces of classical Arabic poetry. He has translated the ten Mu‘allaqat and poems by classical Arab poets and authors, among them Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Hazm, Abu Nuwas, Abu Tammam and Abu al-‘Ala, as well as contemporary poets and writers such as Gibran Khalil Gibran, Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, Mohammed Bennis, Naguib Mahfouz, Ghassan Kanafani and others.
Suçin studied Arabic at Ankara University, first earning his bachelor’s degree. His first academic work was on Gibran Khalil Gibran, which led him to translate three of Gibran’s books, Spirits Rebellious, A Tear and a Smile and The Tempests, among his earliest translations. On that basis he came to regard Gibran as his first teacher in translating from Arabic. He went on with his academic studies to earn a doctorate in Arabic language and literature, and devoted himself to teaching them at university.
In addition to translating from Arabic into Turkish, Suçin has translated many poems from Turkish into Arabic, particularly from Turkish Sufi poetry, including the Sufi poet Yunus Emre (13th century) and the poet and philosopher Ahmed Yesevi (12th century). He has also translated poems by some seventy poets, forming an anthology that represents modern Turkish poetry in all its variety, which he is preparing for publication soon. He worked with his wife, herself a poet, to select the poems so that the anthology would cover the modern Turkish poetry scene.
Al-Mutanabbi completes Arabic poetics
Suçin believed that the translation of classical Arabic poetry into Turkish could not be complete without al-Mutanabbi, with whom he had been fascinated ever since he began reading and studying him, and whom he considers one of the pillars of Arabic poetics, classical and modern. Suçin notes that al-Mutanabbi, who had never been translated into Turkish, was known in the past to some poets of the famous “Divan” school of the Ottoman period, and left his mark on Ottoman poets such as Nef‘i and Baki. The poetic elite of that time knew three languages, Turkish, Persian and Arabic, and some of them wrote poems in all three. Ottoman Turkish blended these three languages, and there was no need then to translate Arabic poetry.
Suçin has at last fulfilled his dream of translating al-Mutanabbi into modern Turkish, the first such translation. He gathered 145 texts selected from the complete divan, ranging from a single line to two lines and several lines, so that they may be called poetic “fragments.” Suçin collected these “fragments” in a single volume recently published in Turkish and Arabic by Everest Publishing.
Three obstacles
Translating al-Mutanabbi is no easy task; his translators into every other language have admitted as much. The first obstacle is perhaps the eloquence, rhetoric and all the embellishments that Abu al-‘Ala summed up in the phrase “Mu‘jiz Ahmad” [Ahmad’s Miracle]. In al-Mutanabbi’s poetry they come together to form a classical, aesthetic linguistic fabric that is unique and singular. The second obstacle is the prosodic music that al-Mutanabbi skilfully wrought and cast in rhythms, echoes and marvellous constructions that have long been studied. The third is the meanings, which have often remained closed to critics and readers through the ages and around which many critical “battles” have been fought.
But Suçin, enthralled by al-Mutanabbi, tried to overcome these obstacles or difficulties as a scholar who has studied him academically and has taught and continues to teach him. He turned to the most important sources on the poet, relying among them on the commentary of al-Wahidi, Abu al-‘Ala al-Ma‘arri’s commentary Mu‘jiz Ahmad, Abu al-Baqa’ al-‘Ukbari’s al-Tibyan fi Sharh al-Diwan, and Nasif al-Yaziji’s al-‘Urf al-Tayyib fi Sharh Diwan Abi al-Tayyib. These sources are sufficient, and more than sufficient, for translating al-Mutanabbi.
Asked during our meeting at the Abu Dhabi Book Fair about the question of rhythm in Turkish poetry, Suçin said: “When I translate Arabic poetry, I try not to sacrifice content for the sake of rhythm, and I recreate the poetic rhythm itself. In translating classical Arabic poetry, I rewrite the poetic text in Turkish through internal rhythm and flowing rhymes, without any affectation or artifice that would destroy the structure of the poem. I always try to adopt a modern language with a classical flavour, which is what we expect from translations of Shakespeare, Dante and the other great poets. I wanted to present al-Mutanabbi to the Turkish reader as both a great Arab poet and a great world poet. In the translation I used similar syllable counts for the lines, with unforced rhymes, while preserving the internal rhythm.”
Suçin chose a distinctive title for the selection: The Song of Man. With it he perhaps wanted to stress that he had chosen passages from the emotional poetry al-Mutanabbi wrote in moments of solitude and seclusion, turned inward and listening to his deepest self, away from the poems of satire, praise, martial ardour, boasting and grandeur. Suçin believes that the emotional poems can cross the borders of geography, making al-Mutanabbi a humane poet who addresses the world through his poetry. This, he says, is perhaps what he expresses in his preface. In his view, al-Mutanabbi’s poetry is the song of man through the ages: lifetimes change, as do people and poems, but the song always remains the same. For him, al-Mutanabbi is to the Arabs what Dante Alighieri is to the Italians, William Shakespeare to the British, Goethe to the Germans and Victor Hugo to the French.
Mohammad Nour al-Din’s reading
Seeking the view of a scholar of Turkish literature who had read this translation, I put some questions to Dr. Mohammad Nour al-Din, author of studies on Turkish literature, including an important academic study of the poet Nâzım Hikmet. He said: “Whenever one hears that poetry is being translated from one language into another, one’s heart, as they say, leaps into one’s mouth. For poetry differs from all the other creative arts in its rhythm, which should be inseparable from it, whether external or internal, or the mutual ‘associative movement’ of words. This applies to modern and contemporary poetry; how much more so when it is classical, ‘difficult’ Arabic poetry more than a thousand years old? Even so, what I have read of Dr. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s translation of a selection of al-Mutanabbi’s poetry was fantastic and astonishing.”
Nour al-Din says: “I felt, perhaps, that if al-Mutanabbi were ‘known’ through this translation, he could go on ‘sleeping’ in peace. For Suçin commands Arabic on the one hand and possesses a high poetic sensibility on the other. Once the meaning yielded to him, and meaning is an absolute priority even in poetry translation, the surprise lay in the way he wrote it in a Turkish poetic idiom with both external and internal rhythm. This is perhaps what many other translations of poetic texts lack.”
He adds: “What is more, Suçin came to al-Mutanabbi after long experience with other Arabic texts, classical and modern. He gave the translation of al-Mutanabbi the essence of his experience. That is why he did not want al-Mutanabbi to be estranged even from his own language. Suçin smoothly worked to fit the text to a ‘modernized’ classical Turkish poetic language, combining two ‘spirits’: the past in metre and rhyme, and the contemporary in modern vocabulary. I think reconciling the two is no easy matter. But Suçin succeeded.”
On how Turkish readers will receive the translation, and al-Mutanabbi himself, he says: “I am certain that the Turkish reader’s reaction will be positive. Turks are undoubtedly not used to occasional poetry as the Arabs are, though it does appear at times in their classical poems, which go back no more than a few centuries and are known as Divan poetry. What Suçin has done is to reduce the occasional poetry, especially that of boasting and martial ardour, and to focus on the emotional and human dimension of al-Mutanabbi’s poems.”
And he adds: “What matters in Suçin’s work is that he moves the Turkish reader from getting to know contemporary Arabic poetry, which is the custom of most translators, to getting to know classical Arabic poetry, indeed its very masterpieces, led by the poems of al-Mutanabbi and, before him, Imru’ al-Qays. In my view, what is equally important here is that Suçin conveys this poetry with a fidelity that respects the characteristics of both the old and the new periods, and with full poetic quality. After that, the Turkish reader is free to accept or reject it.”
Originally published as: Abdo Wazen, “The Poet of “The Horses, the Night and the Desert” Translated into Turkish for the First Time; His Influence Once Reached Ottoman Poetry,” Independent Arabia, 12 May 2024. Translated from the Arabic for this site.